Five Muppet Moments That Remind Us They Didn’t Always Suck

Did you hate ABC’s new reboot of The Muppets? Yeah, so did we. While the Office-style revamp of the beloved characters from our childhood may have made the unassuming counterculture figures seem incredibly vapid and misanthropic compared to their usual warm, playful, and goofy sensibilities, all isn’t lost. For one, we have our own rose-colored nostalgia that keeps us loving the felt and fur-covered puppets forever. And we have the films in which they starred (particularly the great trifecta from the Muppets’ heyday: The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan). And, because this is the Internet, there’s a treasure trove of brilliant Muppets moments. Here are some of the best — or, at the very least, my favorite (I’m in charge of this list after all).

The Koozebanian Mating Ritual

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbXzpoH6m2c]

Here’s a perfect example of what made The Muppet Show so brilliant: it was wacky and silly enough for kids to enjoy it, but its sketches maintained enough subtext for adults to laugh along, too (particularly as it was for them anyway). This send-up of a nature show, which finds Kermit’s news correspondent sent to the extraterrestrial world of Koozebane (a regular setting for some of the show’s weirder sketches), pokes fun at the types of nature documentaries that seem, well, a little too interested in animal mating rituals. And while the notion of these two Koozebanian natives’ manic hooting and stomping mating ritual (not too far off from our own, is it?) may have gone over the heads of more than a few little kids who caught the segment, its hilarious pay-off is perfect, finally answering the question, “Where do Koozebanian babies come from?”

Baby Muppets!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npUdoua5JSs]

An entire generation (mine, to be honest) grew up on the toddler versions of Kermit and Co. with the successful cartoon Muppet Babies, which ran for a whopping seven seasons on CBS. It offered a tamer, more innocent version of the adult Muppets in which our favorite characters (plus a few new ones) viewed the expansive world beyond their playroom with wide-eyed wonder (and under the care of Nanny, that disturbing pair of dismembered legs in striped knee-high socks). But any true Muppet fan will know that the animated series was inspired by a scene in what is probably the best Muppet movie, The Muppets Take Manhattan: a jazzy little dream sequence in which Miss Piggy imagines what she and Kermit (and Gonzo, Skeeter, Rowlf, and Fozzie) would have been like had they grown up together.

Jazzy Little Worms

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-kDtgtF9qU]

The Muppets are all animals and whats-its, generally anthropomorphic and able to communicate through English (or some form of it, anyway). But some of the best Muppets were the nonverbal weirdos who still managed to get something or other across through their physical expressions and movements. It’s a testament not just to the bizarre folks who wrote The Muppet Show, but also the Muppeteers themselves. Here’s an example of a pair of the characters that, like most Muppet sketches, starts in a weird, silly place and ends in the typical and awkwardly dark way.

Rita Moreno Duets With Animal

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=10&v=FDjXeWksP4w]

I saw this clip countless times when I was a kid, and I was certain that nothing — no movie, television show, or clever commercial — could possibly be any funnier. The EGOT-holding Rita Moreno stops by The Muppet Show set to perform a sexy rendition of that Peggy Lee classic, “Fever.” But perhaps assigning Animal up as her accompanist wasn’t the greatest idea, as the two have various performance philosophies. Moreno’s slinky, sexy number is disrupted by Animal’s overeager drumming, and her slow, eventual slip into madness ends with her nailing the last note. (I still think this is probably the funniest things I’ve ever seen.)

The Muppets Mourn Jim Henson's Death

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRSptCfn5WY]

One of the most beautiful, and at times unsettling, aspects of the Muppets was their surprising self-awareness. They knew better than to look down — they knew what was below their midsection, what the camera frame protected us from seeing anything that would ruin the magic of the Muppets. (A cancelled episode of short-lived 1989 series The Jim Henson Hour titled “Secrets of the Muppets” (which you can watch here) was aired as a stand-alone special on Nickelodeon in 1992 and depicts Henson helping his furry friends cope with the fact that they are, in fact, just puppets.)

When Henson died in 1990, the Muppets briefly acknowledged, by way of paying tribute to their departed creator, the bittersweet nature of the Real World. It is full of the kind of magic that Jim Henson brought into our hearts through his brilliant creativity as it is full of dark, traumatic moments, and his efforts to contain the world’s chaos through comically controlled mania is the blissful editing of the universe’s ills that’s exactly what endeared all of us to the Muppets in the first place.